|
I was born in the year 18-- to a large fortune, endowed besides
with excellent parts, inclined by nature to industry, fond of the
respect of the wise and good among my fellowmen, and thus, as
might have been supposed, with every guarantee of an honourable
and distinguished future. And indeed the worst of my faults was a
certain impatient gaiety of disposition, such as has made the
happiness of many, but such as I found it hard to reconcile with
my imperious desire to carry my head high, and wear a more than
commonly grave countenance before the public. Hence it came about
that I concealed my pleasures; and that when I reached years of
reflection, and began to look round me and take stock of my
progress and position in the world, I stood already committed to a
profound duplicity of me. Many a man would have even blazoned
such irregularities as I was guilty of; but from the high views
that I had set before me, I regarded and hid them with an almost
morbid sense of shame. It was thus rather the exacting nature of
my aspirations than any particular degradation in my faults, that
made me what I was, and, with even a deeper trench than in the
majority of men, severed in me those provinces of good and ill
which divide and compound man's dual nature. In this case, I was
driven to reflect deeply and inveterately on that hard law of
life, which lies at the root of religion and is one of the most
plentiful springs of distress. Though so profound a
double-dealer, I was in no sense a hypocrite; both sides of me
were in dead earnest; I was no more myself when I laid aside
restraint and plunged in shame, than when I laboured, in the eye
of day, at the futherance of knowledge or the relief of sorrow and
suffering. And it chanced that the direction of my scientific
studies, which led wholly towards the mystic and the
transcendental, reacted and shed a strong light on this
consciousness of the perennial war among my members. With every
day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the
intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to that truth, by whose
partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck:
that man is not truly one, but truly two. I say two, because the
state of my own knowledge does not pass beyond that point. Others
will follow, others will outstrip me on the same lines; and I
hazard the guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere
polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens. I,
for my part, from the nature of my life, advanced infallibly in
one direction and in one direction only. It was on the moral
side, and in my own person, that I learned to recognise the
thorough and primitive duality of man; I saw that, of the two
natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I
could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was
radically both; and from an early date, even before the course of
my scientific discoveries had begun to suggest the most naked
possibility of such a miracle, I had learned to dwell with
pleasure, as a beloved daydream, on the thought of the separation
of these elements. If each, I told myself, could be housed in
separate identities, life would be relieved of all that was
unbearable; the unjust might go his way, delivered from the
aspirations and remorse of his more upright twin; and the just
could walk steadfastly and securely on his upward path, doing the
good things in which he found his pleasure, and no longer exposed
to disgrace and penitence by the hands of this extraneous evil.
It was the curse of mankind that these incongruous faggots were
thus bound together--that in the agonised womb of consciousness,
these polar twins should be continuously struggling. How, then
were they dissociated?
I was so far in my reflections when, as I have said, a side
light began to shine upon the subject from the laboratory table.
I began to perceive more deeply than it has ever yet been stated,
the trembling immateriality, the mistlike transience, of this
seemingly so solid body in which we walk attired. Certain agents
I found to have the power to shake and pluck back that fleshly
vestment, even as a wind might toss the curtains of a pavilion.
For two good reasons, I will not enter deeply into this scientific
branch of my confession. First, because I have been made to learn
that the doom and burthen of our life is bound for ever on man's
shoulders, and when the attempt is made to cast it off, it but
returns upon us with more unfamiliar and more awful pressure.
Second, because, as my narrative will make, alas! too evident, my
discoveries were incomplete. Enough then, that I not only
recognised my natural body from the mere aura and effulgence of
certain of the powers that made up my spirit, but managed to
compound a drug by which these powers should be dethroned from
their supremacy, and a second form and countenance substituted,
none the less natural to me because they were the expression, and
bore the stamp of lower elements in my soul.
I hesitated long before I put this theory to the test of
practice. I knew well that I risked death; for any drug that so
potently controlled and shook the very fortress of identity,
might, by the least scruple of an overdose or at the least
inopportunity in the moment of exhibition, utterly blot out that
immaterial tabernacle which I looked to it to change. But the
temptation of a discovery so singular and profound at last
overcame the suggestions of alarm. I had long since prepared my
tincture; I purchased at once, from a firm of wholesale chemists,
a large quantity of a particular salt which I knew, from my
experiments, to be the last ingredient required; and late one
accursed night, I compounded the elements, watched them boil and
smoke together in the glass, and when the ebullition had subsided,
with a strong glow of courage, drank off the potion.
|
